A Practical Introduction to Real-World Research

Getting the Job Done

KEY FEATURES:

• Common methodologies that span a variety of social science arenas such as social work, criminal justice, mental health, and general sociology, prepare students for real-world research in their chosen fields.
• Chapters relating to methodology include either a summary feature to aid in decision making and/or a section on common methodological challenges along with some suggestions for how to address these challenges in the real world.  
• Decision trees throughout the book focus on a particular choice that researchers make in the course of their work and walk readers through the consequences and outcomes of each step.
• A focus on how to make statistical decisions rather than on how to calculate the decided statistic by hand gives students the tools they need to analyze a greater variety of statistics.
• Practical skills for sharing results formally or informally with colleagues and presenting research to different audiences, such as funding agencies, the media, or the general public, prepare students for their future careers.
• A focus on statistical decisions and how to run the decided statistic in SPSS and R provides coverage of statistics that are useful in the real world.
• A strong discussion of how to do a literature review helps students understand the structure of a scholarly paper.
• Guidance on running the statistical tests covered in Chapters 11-14 in both SPSS and R is provided in an appendix, and GSS datasets prepared for importing into SPSS and R are included on the accompanying website.